Former Aides Compare Notes on Trump, Obama Tweets

Mike Dubke, a former White House communications director for President Donald Trump, arriving in the East Room of the White House in Washington in April, a month before he left the post.
Photo:
Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

WASHINGTON—A former senior White House aide described both the excitement and frustrations of working for a president who often writes his own tweets, recalling how Donald
Trump
would upend the national conversation with a 140-character message that aides hadn’t always vetted.

Michael Dubke,
who left the communications director job in May, said of his three months in the West Wing that “you’re always looking over both shoulders”—at what the news media was saying and what Mr. Trump was saying.

“And that’s what made it a job that was both thrilling and difficult at the same time,” he said.

Speaking at the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown University’s McCourt School, Mr. Dubke suggested that aides on occasion were as surprised by Mr. Trump’s tweets as anyone else.

One tweet might “change the entire narrative on cable news,” he said.

“A single tweet would then dictate what the programming was for the next hour and a half on cable news, which is an amazing power but also an amazing distraction,” he added.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At early-morning staff meetings, Mr. Dubke recalled, aides might be dealing with bill signings, pending legislation and executive orders while “having to react to a tweet that might not have been vetted through any channels before it went out.”

Mr. Dubke appeared at Georgetown with
Jen Psaki,
a former communications director in
Barack Obama’s
White House.

Speaking to a student audience, the two shared experiences and swapped insights about life in the White House.

Having worked for different presidents from different parties, they found common ground when it came to the communications-director position: Both described it as one of the best jobs in the West Wing.

Jen Psaki, a former White House communications director in the Obama administration, speaking at an event in July.
Photo:
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News

They also commiserated over how the communications team would be blamed for troubles that couldn’t always be fixed with a pithier message.

“We used to joke that we wanted to make T-shirts that said, ‘It’s a communications problem.’ Sometimes it’s not a communications problem,” Ms. Psaki said. “It’s a policy problem. There’s a civil war in Syria. We can’t write talking points that actually make that better.”

Mr. Trump’s communications team had a similar lament.

“It’s amazing because we had the same thought in our department,” Mr. Dubke said. “It said: ‘It’s a communications problem’ on the back. And on the front it said, ‘Covfefe.’ ”

That is a reference to a Trump tweet back in May, when he tweeted a sentence fragment that debuted the word, “covfefe.” A misspelling, or a message of some sort? Mr. Trump let the mystery play out.

“Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe?’ ” the president later wrote.

Mr. Dubke portrayed the president as a practiced
Twitter
user who has “a very good handle on how to abbreviate into 140 characters.”

At one point, Mr. Dubke posed a question to Ms. Psaki: Did Mr. Obama craft his own tweets and how did the communications team handle them?

She described a more structured approach.

When Mr. Obama wanted to tweet on something, prospective messages would circulate to a small group of West Wing aides, including Ms. Psaki, the press secretary and, on occasion, a researcher who would check facts.

“It wasn’t that he was sitting with his phone at 7 a.m., but he always approved what was going out,” she said of the former president.